Fail!

Against the capitalist appropriation of the concept of failure

Christian Nirvana Damato

27 July 2025

The Right Mistake. The Science of Failing Well is a book written by Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership at Harvard Business School. In 2023 the text won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year. Now, we know very well that to fail is human, very human, that you still fail and you will fail better, as Samuel Beckett would say, yet this publishing case leaves one question emerging: what happens when capitalism appropriates the concept of failure?

Perhaps we have moved from a society of excess, whose imperative was Enjoy, to a failed society that must naturalize, de-emphasize, and romanticize a new imperative: Fail!  This is in summary the reflection I will attempt to articulate in this short text.

As capitalism proceeds relentlessly through technological development, vampirizing the earth's resources, energies and dignities, it constantly reshapes itself in order to remove responsibility for what happens and naturalize its condition as inevitable and necessary. As human beings are racing against the clock of the technologies they create and overpowering them-a divorce in which ''technology evolves faster than cultures'' (Stiegler, 1994, p. 26)-making any configuration of other possible worlds impossible, the result is the creation of a self-absolving necessity of the system that must somehow realign the human with the machine. This realignment appears to be increasingly difficult, because the process of automation involves an ever-sharper disconnect between the chronobiological limits of humans and the algorithmic limits of machines.

What a pandino can do[1]: porosity, reappropriation of technology, and total automation

In 1926, sociologist and economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel, while staying in Naples, wrote an article entitled The Ideal of the Broken Down: On the Neapolitan Approach to Things Technical. The text reported how - paraphrasing it - the rule for every technological object in Naples was that it was broken, and that it was from this brokenness that objects could and did begin to function (Sohn-Rethel, 1926). For example, a' broken-down car was fixed with a piece of wood found on the street, a motorcycle engine could be used to whip cream in a dairy, the broken-down one in a boat turn into a coffee machine, and so on. This creative use of technology creates between human being and machine a condition of "porosity," a character outlined by Benjamin precisely in his text Naples, written with Asja Lacis and the result of city excursions in which Sohn-Rethel himself participated (Mittelmeier, 2019, p. 29). Porosity, while emerging as a reflection from the stay in Naples, is conceived as ''the law of this life, inexhaustible and all to be discovered'' (Benjamin-Lacis, 1923-1927, p. 311)...tuff is porous, it lets life and happenings pass through it, it is open and receptive. Beyond Sohn-Rethel's exotic awe, the approach to technology that he enthusiastically reports can be found not only in Naples but just about everywhere, in space but not in time, since the possibility of unskilled human maneuvering depends on the limits of the complexity of a machine or technological object

We could thus interpret Sohn-Rethel's stories as the intimate construction of a human-machine relationship where the revitalization of the broken technological object creates the pretext for a kind of subjectification of the object that would appear more "lived-in," creating on it a temporal track perceptible to the human being interacting with it. My uncle, for example, when recounting his relationship with his first car, talks about it as if it had been his best friend, lover and confidant. This sharing of lived life is traced and imprinted through marks, scratches, and wear that make the car a receptive body, perceived as quasi-living. But it is not just about sharing: what is established is a true intimate relationship of care and maintenance between the driver (in this case my uncle) and the car. This is nurtured, cleaned, spruced up, polished, touched, displayed. Crash by J. G. Ballard is ultimately not so abstract and averse from being didactic. Thus a relationship of porosity, interpenetration, and complicity arises.

Both in the case of re-functionalization of broken objects and in the case of extreme care and responsibility toward them, a close relationship of human agency and responsibility is created in the functioning of the objects themselves: technology is fallible and we can fix it and take care of it. Commenting on Sohn-Rethel's examples of twentieth-century Naples, in Notes on technical normativity, the Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui asserts how the Neapolitan practice of anarchic reappropriation of technology is increasingly difficult if not impossible today: ‹‹when machines have evolved into a complexity beyond the comprehension of their producers, and into a scale of gigantic technical systems, these wisdoms come to their limit. The non-engineering solutions no longer seem to work. [...] Today, it is hard to imagine using a piece of wood to ignite the engine of a Volkswagen or to hit an iPad until it works›› (Hui, 2023, p. 159).

This shift from a possibly anarchic conception of our relationship with technology to a much more passive and defenseless state is the result of a paradigm shift that affects not only objects for use and consumption, but more broadly the increase in the very complexity of the means of production given by dematerialization, decentralization and sophistication of them. All of this, of course, has enormous implications.

How automation makes us more responsible and fallible

According to Hui ‹‹The history of technology is precisely the history of accident, in other words, technological progress is not possible without accidents both internal and external to itself. The accidents produced by technology are what allow it to improve toward perfection›› (Hui, 2023, p. 161). It is not just about random accidents that cause unexpected breakthroughs or side inventions: especially today, it is about anticipating, planning and controlling the accident or errors in order to keep a system functional and stable.

Paradoxically, the more the level of automation increases, the more human responsibility for maintenance increases; human beings, in an increasingly complex technological ecosystem innervated with geopolitical and market balances, become increasingly fallible, less of an agent in modifying and manipulating their surroundings, and even more culpable for disasters on a large or planetary scale.

Technology today advances thanks to a capitalist system that makes its crisis the motive and necessity for unceasing development and progress, a destructive process that in turn brings new crises, creating an endless loop of failures. The imperative of the current system is thus precisely failure, covered by a seemingly perfect technological development impervious to our fallibility as mortals. In other words; the stability of the system is based on a process of internal and constant instability. Mistakes or failures, in such a logic, are therefore perfectly integrated and necessary for overall stability. Might not this logic also permeate the new capitalist narratives about the individualization of the self?

Capitalist appropriation of the praise of failure: from the imperative Enjoy! to Fail!

We are accustomed to the stupid capitalism that extols success, efficiency, competition and self-fulfillment, the capitalism of talent out of thin air and the myths of the self-made, the one that calculates, judges and turns our performance into numbers and rankings. This capitalism is stupid in that it continues undaunted by focusing on increasingly unreal aspects that do not take into account the social complexity of the system it has created. As a critique of this system that introjects into the individual the anxiety, terror and prohibition of failure, the so-called tyranny of evaluation (del Rey, 2013), literature, art and criticism have long responded with poetic and necessary praise of error and failure, from the aforementioned Beckett to glitches of various kinds.

If in the beginning human beings follow the biological clock, with the expanded externalization of technology we find the physical limits of a human being who can no longer follow his creation: he always arrives late, like Epimetheus (Stiegler, 2018), and so fails. He fails often and feels guilty.

The good society of course helps us, with bonus drugs and palliatives, or with helpful tips for better living. An example: let us now return to Edmondson's text. In the synopsis in the Financial Times "Best Business Books" presentation we read "We used to think of failure as a problem, to be avoided at all costs. Now, we're often told that failure is desirable-that we must 'fail fast, fail often.' The trouble is, neither approach distinguishes the good failures from the bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well." Let us pay attention to the words, for they highlight precisely the interpretive appropriation of this praise of failure: "We used to think of failure as a problem, to be avoided at all costs [here we see an admission of guilt. Capitalism, the leaders of companies, of the market, those who move the economy and those who work, admit that it is time to change the narrative]. Now, we're often told that failure is desirable-that we must 'fail fast, fail often' [who says this? They want to draw from all that used to be criticism of capitalism and its logics, absorb the concept and repurpose it]. The trouble is, neither approach distinguishes the good failures from the bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well [here such an operation is justified: those scoundrels speak of mistakes and failure with unproductive, poetic, anti-capitalist intentions. We want to readjust this concept and make it not only desirable, but an opportunity]"

One cannot count the banners, posts, advertisements, narratives, articles and books in which this "science of failing well" is proposed as the backbone of success. Capitalism thus appropriates the concept of failure to build a model of entrepreneurial mindset.

Tailored ad hoc to a broad target audience, the new capitalist imperative of failure traces and makes desirable its most nefarious effects: a system that reproduces subjects who are not fallible, but failed in that they are unable to achieve their promises, dreams, and desires, will tell you that it is good to fail by making you fail and attempting to get you back into a dynamic of enjoyment through failure.

Guilt is immediately absolved by the new capitalist injunction: Fail!

The capitalist injunction to fail is not just a preference to be adhered to, but a necessity, as well as a constant publicity wish that accompanies and cheers the individual in his probable and many failures in a system that through technological refinement is self-reproducing through no longer the failure of the machine but of the human being itself. If crisis is the accelerative engine of capitalism, (individual) failure is the latter's new labor force. Fail! Enjoy the fact that your every failure will contribute to personal and future growth, accept with a big smile that after failure you will have to work twice as hard to make it. Accept that if you were not born rich the shadow of failure behind the wall will be hard to get rid of.

In a society no longer based on repression but on permissiveness, for capitalism the imperative "Enjoy!" becomes unnecessary and increasingly problematic in several respects. Capital and technology must re-tune with individuals, capture their new discontents and spit them back out as natural and desirable conditions of living and moving forward.

No more praise

At this point, with appropriation now in place, we must say that failure is not what they are resemantizing. There is no business of failure or desirability of failure.

Today, at least as far as the last generation starting with mine is concerned, no one wants to hear "sacrifice" or even "enjoy"; maybe we just want someone to say "go ahead and fail." But why do we want that? It is right and normal to fail, but a system that reproduces obligatory and potentially incessant failure is wrong. Praise for failure is useful as comfort; it is poetic in its unproductive measure. In the psychic neurosis of a failed system that drives you to fail, tripping you up and kicking you in the face, leaving you on the edge of survival and depriving you of all dream and promise, failure has nothing romantic about it. No new narcotic myths are needed. No one really wants to fail. Failure sucks!

Don't learn anything

In the capitalist appropriation of the concept of failure, failure as an anomaly with no solution is not taken into account. Failure is good only if it is useful to make you run more. Failure is good if you then grow and produce more. If you really stop, you are out. Fail well or get the fuck out.

But failing badly, without growth or purpose, happens sooner or later and is a small/big radical mourning[2] : if understood as such, i.e., as lacking solution, as meaningless, as a travesty of the ego, then this awareness can catalyze into a to-do. Everything can begin, not so much because we have "learned something" from defeat, but because we realize that we have learned nothing at all.

 Bibliography

Ballard J. G., Crash, 2015, Feltrinelli Editore, Milan.

Benjamin-Lacis, Naples, in Benjamin W., Complete Works. Writings 1923-1927, Einaudi, Turin.

del Rey A. Tyrannie de l’evaluation, 2013, La Découverte, Paris.

Edmondson A., The Right Mistake. The science of failing well, 2024, Egea, Milan.

Hui Y., Notes on technical normativity, in Technological accidents, Accidental Technologies, 2023, Brouwer J. and van Tuinen S. (eds.), V2_Publishing, Rotterdam.

Mittelmeier M., Adorno in Naples. An unknown chapter of European philosophy, 2019, Feltrinelli, Milan.

Reshe J., Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead. Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive, 2023, Palgrave Macmillar, Cham.

Sohn-Rethel A. (1926), Das Ideal des Kaputten: Über neapolitanische Technik, in Das Ideal des Kaputten, 2018, ça ira- Verlag, Freiburg.

Stiegler B., (1994) Technique and Time - 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, 2023, Luiss University Press, Rome.

Biography

Christian Nirvana Damato (1994) is a writer, curator, and independent researcher working in the fields of philosophy, technology, psychoanalysis, and visual culture. He teaches media theory at the IED in Turin. He writes and collaborates with various magazines and publishing houses. He is the founder and editorial director of Inactual. He has published Multiplication of Organs Manifesto. Body, Identity, Technology, and Desire, with a preface by Vincenzo Estremo and an afterword by Franco “Bifo” Berardi (Becoming Press, 2025), Medial Disorders. Interpretive and Non-statistical Compendium of Technological Disorders. Vol I, with contributions by Geert Lovink, Alfie Bown, Isabel Millar, Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture) et al. (Inactual, 2024) and Medial Disorders Vol II are forthcoming.

[1]The term "pandino" refers to the small Fiat Panda 4x4, a historical and emblematic model for the discourse elaborated in the paragraph, in that it is a proletarian, non-bourgeois car (my fishmonger grandfather used it), which went through precisely that historical period and that social class devoted to the most creative do-it-yourself repairs.

[2] Embracing an idea of radical failure may prove, although counterintuitive, an emancipatory approach. As a function of such a proposal, see J. Reshe, Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead. Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive, Palgrave Macmillar, Cham.